Amazon Web Services

AWS offers "fleets" of virtualized machines and various networking infrastructure atop them.

Getting started

• There's a "Free Tier" for new customers, providing 5GB of space and 1 year of an EC2 "Micro" instance
  • A valid credit card and phone number are required
• Download the command line tools (a Java package)

Authentication

• Go to the "Security Credentials" page and acquire your "Access ID" and "Access Key" (~40 byte hashes)
• You can use the access key in three ways:
  • Fill in the template values in credential-file-path.template from the unpacked command line tools' directory, and export AWS_CREDENTIAL_FILE pointing to this file
  • Reference this same file via --aws-credential-file file as an argument to all commands
  • Provide --I ID --S Key as arguments to all commands
• I add the following to .bashrc:

AWS="$HOME/.aws"
export PATH="$PATH:$AWS/bin"
export AWS_CREDENTIAL_FILE="$AWS/credential-file-path.template"
unset AWS

• Autoscaling